Impulsive consensus tracking for leader-following multi-AUV system with sampled information

In this paper, impulsive consensus tracking for a leader-following multiple autonomous underwater vehicles (multi-AUV) system with sampled information is studied. Two novel impulsive consensus protocols are proposed to address both the multi-AUV system recovery problem with the static leader and the formation tracking problem with the dynamic leader. It is worth noting that the proposed control protocols do not require continuous information exchange between AUVs. For the static leader case, each AUV only needs to exchange position information with its neighbors at sampling instants. For the dynamic leader case, only partial follower AUVs can obtain position information of the leader AUV at sampling instants. By using the stability theory of impulsive systems and algebraic graph theory, sufficient conditions to guarantee the leader-following consensus of the multi-AUV system are obtained. Furthermore, both the proposed algorithms can save the bandwidth of underwater acoustic communication and improve the robustness of the system. Finally, two numerical simulations are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed theoretical analysis.